Jones' official title is Special Advisor on Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation for the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

The 41-year-old Yale Law School graduate and civil rights lawyer is also the founder of California's Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, "a non-profit agency for justice, opportunities and peace."

Sounds idyllic, but Jones' past isn't so pastoral.

The Ella Baker Center was connected to STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement), a "multi-racial activist collective with Marxist influences" with which Jones was involved.

In 1992, Van Jones founded another STORM project, Bay Area PoliceWatch, a "hotline and lawyer-referral service for victims and survivors of police abuse." This is fitting, perhaps, since Jones was himself arrested and detained briefly during a protest after the Rodney King verdict that same year.

Jones told the East Bay Express in 2005:

I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th [1992], and then the verdicts came down on April 29th. By August, I was a communist. (...)
I met all these young radical people of color – I mean really radical: communists and anarchists. And it was, like, 'This is what I need to be a part of.' I spent the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary.
Like a character out of The Big Chill, Van Jones seems to have evolved from radical activist to Establishment insider. Perhaps only a left-wing administration incapable of recognizing irony would put a self-described communist in charge of creating jobs.

Luckily for Van Jones, and Obama's many other "Czars" with dubious credentials and troubling backgrounds, his new job was not dependent upon making it through Congressional hearings.

For more info: Earlier this week, we looked at Obama's new "Science Czar" John P. Holdren, a longtime radical whose beliefs about ecology are tinged with misanthropy.